Wandering around Berlin's Bode Museum yesterday led past plenty a Medieval masterpiece of wood sculpture. The above pairing of two pieces is an especially delightful part of the exhibition because of the narrative it creates. Although made in different parts of central Europe by different hands (around the same time, within a generation or two of 1500), here the sculptures are placed together as if they belonged to a common story. As the ever-alluring Saint Sebastian twists his nude body against the arrow wounds that would make him a martyr, four apostles crane their necks from the adjoining wall to get a better look. The label for the latter piece tells us that the four men originally belonged to a scene of the death of the Virgin Mary; but their dramatic LOOKING makes them powerful directors of our attention to another piece in the museum gallery. They channel our gaze around the corner to the beautiful wind-blown Sebastian. The interaction between the two pieces encourages us to compare, contrast, appreciate—and maybe even chuckle at the insatiable human desire to look, look, look.

I'm too excited about this news to omit it from this blog on the grounds of not being a display technique. Anyway, as a highly interactive medium to generate visitor interest in the collection, it is part of a synergy with actual displays—and, crucially, it works outside the museum as well as inside. So what is this all about? A recent ﻿article in the New York Times﻿ reports that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is reaching potential visitors via a text message program. Texting the museum at 57251 with the request "Send me ---" will retrieve an automated response of a photo of an artwork at SFMOMA captioned with its creator, title, and year. In a twist of modern hilarity, the "---" can be a word or, yes, an emoji. This has led to fascinating data on visitors' desires and interests:

"The top emoji requests included the robot, the heart, the rainbow, 'and, of course, poop,' Mr. Winesmith said. 'And then, because it’s the internet, it’s a lot of food and a lot of animals.'"

​Requests at night are apparently more personal, referring to family and home. Some requests are denied by the museum's autoresponse system: nudity, but also, interestingly, artists' names. The museum wants its text-visitors (they are still visitors, aren't they?) to be more creative than that; and they've found that the requests immediately following denied requests are indeed more creative. What a marvelous experiment! We can learn a lot from this about how to improve museums both within and without their walls.

A slideshow in Vogue presents the current collaborative exhibition by the Munich Antikensammlungen & Glyptothek with students of the AMD Akademie Mode & Design (links below).

Divine#Design, an exhibition running through October at the Antikensammlungen and Glyptothek in Munich brings contemporary fashion into dialogue with ancient sculpture (somewhat like the exhibit in Aidone, Sicily described in a recent post). Students at the AMD Akademie Mode & Design were invited to create clothing inspired by the highlights of the antiquities collection. The juxtaposition of old and new is meant to raise questions about the social relevance and effect of clothing, makeup, and hairstyle. For perhaps the first time, an antiquities show has earned a slideshow in Vogue magazine! Flipping through the slides shows the many ways the students responded to the ancient objects: in texture ("swallowtail" folds in a hemline), color (lots of whites and beiges), content (a real snake posed beside a head of Medusa), and form (a petticoat cage shaped like a vase; a "fat suit" to imitate musculature). The sheer imagination of these designers brings new life to the collection.